FMCSA Steps Up Hazmat Compliance as Part of Planned Changes to CSA

This story appears in the Sept. 3 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced it is moving ahead with changes to its safety ratings program in December, including stepping up hazardous materials compliance and eliminating a perceived enforcement bias against flatbed carriers.

FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro said the tweaks to the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program will only cause “modest” changes to carriers’ percentile scores, but “enough to sharpen our focus on the carriers that need to have our focus.”

She confirmed the changes, initially proposed in March, during an Aug. 24 news conference. Trucking officials said they were pleased changes were being made, but suggested more needs to be done to ensure the system is a fair representation of fleets’ safety.

Ferro said the existing Cargo-Related Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category, or BASIC, will become the Hazardous Materials Compliance BASIC — a stand-alone category that will “better identify hazmat-related safety and compliance problems.”

Scores in this new BASIC will be withheld from public view until December 2013, as the agency continues to make adjustments. Hazmat violations, currently posted in the Cargo Related BASIC, are not public. 

FMCSA said it will subject carriers to a more stringent hazmat intervention threshold only when they have at least two hazmat vehicle inspections within the past 24 months —with one being in the past year — and at least 5% of their total inspections involved a vehicle transporting placarded hazmat.

Currently hazmat carriers are subject to the more rigorous threshold only if they have a hazmat safety permit or have had one inspection while transporting placarded quantities of hazmat within the past 24 months.

Ferro said the agency in December will begin incorporating cargo load security violations into the Vehicle Maintenance BASIC, rather than the Cargo Related BASIC.

FMCSA is also going ahead with a plan to break out crashes-with-injuries and crashes-with-fatalities in carrier profiles, a provision that American Trucking Associations has opposed.

Other changes include removing 1-to-5 mph speeding violations from carrier and driver safety scores, assigning the same severity weights to paper logs and electronic logging device violations and renaming the Fatigue Driving BASIC to the Hours-of-Service Compliance BASIC.

In addition, vehicle violations derived from driver-only inspections and driver violations from vehicle-only inspections will be eliminated, Ferro said.

“These changes, while appreciated, point to the issue ATA has been urging FMCSA to address for some time: CSA scores are not necessarily indicative of elevated crash risk,” ATA President Bill Graves said in a statement. “Several studies have told us this, and FMCSA’s changes indicate they believe it as well.”

However, Ferro credits the CSA program with being “a change agent for safety.”

In 2011, violations for per roadside inspection were down 8% from 2010, and driver violations per roadside inspection were down 10%.

“These are the most dramatic decreases we have seen in violations in a decade,” Ferro said. “Most importantly, our preliminary estimates show that last year fatalities involving commercial motor vehicles dropped by an estimated 4.7%, compared to 2010.”

In a Federal Register posting the same day as Ferro’s announcement, FMCSA rejected nearly all of the arguments made in opposition to creating a Hazmat BASIC and changing the Vehicle Maintenance BASIC.

Several commenters on the Hazmat BASIC changes said that most of the citations issued are “paperwork violations that do not correlate with crash risk or severity.”

“While violations of shipping papers and placards do not cause crashes, the absence of them during mitigation of a crash where hazmat is present can result in injury or death to emergency responders and the public,” FMCSA said.

FMCSA also rejected the argument that carriers that have hazmat scores over the agency’s percentile threshold are necessarily otherwise safe carriers.

“FMCSA’s analysis indicates that nearly half of the motor carriers above the 80th percentile intervention threshold in the [hazmat] BASIC are also above the threshold in at least one other BASIC,” FMCSA said.

The agency also rejected arguments that cargo securement violations do not belong in the Vehicle Maintenance BASIC, but instead in the Unsafe Driving BASIC.

“The Vehicle Maintenance BASIC is focused on the physical condition of the vehicle, of which the cargo is a part, whereas the Unsafe Driving BASIC is focused on how the vehicle is being driven,” FMCSA said.

In an Aug. 27 CSA briefing to members of FMCSA’s Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee, Associate Administrator William Quade said that an agency analysis showed that there is a strong correlation between high carrier percentile scores in several BASICs and crashes.

However, Rob Abbott, vice president of safety policy for ATA, a member of the advisory committee, suggested that the committee do its own analysis.

“We have long contended that FMCSA should be more frank about the limitations of the program and the reliability, accuracy and significance of CSA scores,” Abbott told Transport Topics. “Mr. Quade’s presentation offered the agency’s perspective but failed to present other perspectives.”